Scottish Government and Scottish Environment Protection Agency
Abstract
• The Scottish Environment Protection Agency’s (SEPA) surveillance monitoring networks for rivers and
lochs were established over a decade ago to help assess the state of Scotland’s freshwater environment
and detect environmental change. This long-term monitoring is integral in formulating evidence-based
policy and evaluating whether land and water management aimed at improving environmental quality
is effective.
• SEPA and Scottish Government have commissioned this review of the surveillance networks to better
understand their national representativeness, optimal size and sampling intensities.
• The review also considered new and innovative monitoring technologies, and assessed where these may
help SEPA to more cost-effectively assess long-term trends in the environment.
• The specific aims of this report are: (1) to assess how well the SEPA river surveillance network
represents Scotland’s environment; (2) to identify possible changes in the river surveillance network to
improve its representativeness; (3) to estimate the ability of the existing river and loch surveillance
networks to detect long-term environmental change, and investigate how this might be affected by
changes in sampling regimes; (4) to analyse environmental changes detectable since the inception of the surveillance networks; and (5) to analyse the benefits of adopting new sampling methods